In reply to Justin Tadlock.

Justin, I went back and rewatched starting at the 2:00:00 mark of the video where Matt was talking about Tumblr, just to make sure I was understanding what he said correctly.

The whole point of upgrading the backend of Tumblr to WordPress is to make it so “Tumblr can provide an onramp for an entirely new generation” to the “WordPress ecosystem.” So the skills you learn in Tumblr can be passed over to any part of the WordPress ecosystem because Tumblr itself will be built with WordPress.

So what you said in your comment makes complete sense if Tumblr remained a completely separate entity. But it’s not going to be because if it was, there would be no need to upgrade the backend to WordPress at all.

But since Tumblr is going to be integrated into the “WordPress ecosystem” and become an “onramp” for WordPress, there has to be continuity between the two. In other words, why would a Tumblr customer “upgrade” to WordPress, if they actually end up losing functionality and features that they relied upon and have become used to using? It makes no sense (although I have seen privately owned web platforms do this).

Finally, your mention of it not being needed in the WordPress core to “recreate the functionality on Tumblr” is completely true if you’re a developer, as you could code similar functionality right now (which I was even able to emulate somewhat with jQuery & CSS fairly easily on my site). But again, as Matt noted in the talk, it sounds like he wants to make WordPress much more “accessible” to the average user, thus potentially allowing a designer to design a site “without needing to know code.”